Penn State climate scientist, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ‘climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S.

The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist, Dr Tim Ball (above, right) is expected to instruct his British Columbia attorneys to trigger mandatory punitive court sanctions, including a ruling that Mann did act with criminal intent when using public funds to commit climate data fraud. Mann’s imminent defeat is set to send shock waves worldwide within the climate science community as the outcome will be both a legal and scientific vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that climate scare stories are a “hoax.”

As can be seen from the graphs below; Mann’s cherry-picked version of science makes the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) disappear and shows a pronounced upward ‘tick’ in the late 20th century (the blade of his ‘hockey stick’). But below that, Ball’s graph, using more reliable and widely available public data, shows a much warmer MWP, with temperatures hotter than today, and showing current temperatures well within natural variation.

Michael Mann, who chose to file what many consider to be a cynical SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) libel suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Vancouver six long years ago, has astonished legal experts by refusing to comply with the court direction to hand over all his disputed graph’s data. Mann’s iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of ‘man-made global warming.’

As first reported in Principia Scientific International (February 1, 2017), the defendant in the case, Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball, had won “concessions” against Mann, but at the time the details were kept confidential, pending Mann’s response.

The negative and unresponsive actions of Dr Mann and his lawyer, Roger McConchie, are expected to infuriate the judge and be the signal for the collapse of Mann’s multi-million dollar libel suit against Dr Ball. It will be music to the ears of so-called ‘climate deniers’ like President Donald Trump and his EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt.

As Dr Ball explains:

“Michael Mann moved for an adjournment of the trial scheduled for February 20, 2017. We had little choice because Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable. We agreed to an adjournment with conditions. The major one was that he [Mann] produce all documents including computer codes by February 20th, 2017. He failed to meet the deadline.”

Punishment for Civil Contempt

Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.

The spectacular rise and fall of climate alarmism’s former golden boy is a courtroom battle with even more ramifications than the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. To much fanfare at the time, Mann had sued Ball for daring to publish the damning comment that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State.” Dr Ball brilliantly backed up his exposure of the elaborate international money-making global warming scam in his astonishing book, ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science‘.

In his books, articles, radio and television appearances, Dr. Ball has been resolute in his generation-long war against those who corrupted the field of science to which he had selflessly dedicated his life. Now aged 79, Ball is on the cusp of utter vindication. Despite the stresses and strains on himself and his family, Tim has stood at the forefront of those scientists demanding more openness and transparency from government-funded researchers.

As Ball explains:

“We believe he [Mann] withheld on the basis of a US court ruling that it was all his intellectual property. This ruling was made despite the fact the US taxpayer paid for the research and the research results were used as the basis of literally earth-shattering policies on energy and environment. The problem for him is that the Canadian court holds that you cannot withhold documents that are central to your charge of defamation regardless of the US ruling.”

Likely Repercussions for Science & Climate Policy

A bitter and embarrassing defeat for the self-styled ‘Nobel Prize winner’ who acted as if he was the epitome of virtue, this outcome shames not only Michael Mann, but puts the climate science community in crisis. Many hundreds of peer-reviewed papers cite Mann’s work, which is now effectively junked. Despite having deep-pocketed backers willing and able to feed his ego as a publicity-seeking mouthpiece against skeptics, Mann’s credibility as a champion of environmentalism is in tatters.

But it gets worse for the litigious Penn State professor. Close behind Dr Ball is celebrated writer Mark Steyn. Steyn also defends himself against another one of Mann’s SLAPP suits – this time in Washington DC. Steyn boldly claims Mann “has perverted the norms of science on an industrial scale.” Esteemed American climate scientist, Dr Judith Curry, has submitted to the court an Amicus Curiae legal brief exposing Mann. The world can now see that his six-year legal gambit to silence his most effective critics and chill scientific debate has spectacularly backfired.

But at a time of much clamor about ‘fake news,’ it seems climate scare stories will have a new angle now that the United States has officially stepped back from the Paris Climate Treaty. President Trump was elected on a mandate to weed out climate fraud so his supporters will point to this legal outcome as vindication for a full purge. It makes a mockery of statements made by Mann last February when PSI’s Hans Schreuder and John O’Sullivan publicly backed their colleague, Dr Ball and endorsed the revelations in his book. Mann reacted by moaning:

“It is difficult to keep up with this dizzying ongoing assault on science.”

The perpetrator of the biggest criminal “assault on science” has now become clear: Dr Mann, utterly damned by his contempt of the court order to show his dodgy data.

There can be little doubt that upon the BC Supreme Court ruling that Mann did commit data fraud, over in Washington DC, the EPA’s Scott Pruitt will feel intense pressure from skeptics to initiate a full investigation into Mann, his university and all those conspiring to perpetuate a trillion-dollar carbon tax-raising sting on taxpayers.

With the scent of courtroom victory invigorating pensioner Ball, he reveals he is determined to go for a second such court win this coming Fall. Then he defends a similar libel lawsuit in Vancouver, filed against him by fellow Canadian climate scientist, Andrew Weaver.

On that case Tim reports:

“The second defamation lawsuit involves Andrew Weaver and is scheduled for court in October 2017. We are not sure what will happen as Weaver, who was a lead author for the computer model chapter of four IPCC Reports (1995, 2001, 2007, and 2013), became a politician. He ran for and was elected leader of the British Columbia Green Party and is a sitting member of the provincial legislature. We must continue to prepare for the trial, but it is the prevailing view in the court system that if a scientist becomes a politician their scientific objectivity is compromised – it is considered the bias of a ’noble cause’.”

As a career-long defender of the scientific method, embracing open and transparent verification of important government research, Ball makes this promise to his loyal supporters:

“Regardless of the outcomes I am planning a major campaign to expose to the world how they used the court system to silence me because I dared to speak out against their claims and actions. I am not particularly bright but I had two major threats, I was qualified, and I had an ability to explain in a way the public could understand. These latter abilities were honed in teaching a science credit for arts students for 25 years.”

Saving a final word for his friends and colleagues at Principia Scientific International (PSI) Dr Ball concluded:

“It goes without saying that I could not have done any of this without the support of people [like Gregg Thomspon] who gave money and John O’Sullivan who gave superb advice from a legal and life experience perspective.”

Dr Ball and his PSI colleagues are among those now calling for governments to set aside proper funding for ‘blue team’ scientists and experts skilled in critically examining claims made by so-called government ‘experts’ where they impact public policy. In the final outcome, these ‘devil’s advocates’ of science (or ‘skeptics’) are the best defense against waste and corruption.

To that end, Australian Astronomer and entrepreneur Gregg Thompson has been crucial in providing resources that helped establish PSI as a registered UK charity devoted to this public service. PSI is urging more charitable donations from ordinary citizens to help further the cause of creating more ‘blue team/red team’ initiatives devoted to monitoring government science and prepared to bravely expose negligence and intentional misconduct on the public dime.

"The objective of this research was to test the hypothesis that Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data produced by NOAA, NASA and HADLEY are sufficiently credible estimates of global average temperatures, such that they can be relied upon for climate modelling and policy analysis purposes.... The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation in reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historial data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credibe U.S. and other temperature data."

As Dr Spencer points out in this piece, you can't always believe what the article title implies and you must read these articles yourself to see what is actually said in them. Realizing that many don't actually read them, that's the reason I try to copy and paste most of the articles with the title so you can make an informed decision for yourself! In this piece it seems that Dr Spencer is showing us why we need to do just that.

If I had not looked past the headline of the press report on a new study, I would have just filed it under “It’s worse than we thought”. A new study in Nature reported on July 17 carried the following headlines:

“Satellite snafu masked true sea-level rise for decades”“Revised tallies confirm that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating as the Earth warms and ice sheets thaw.”

When I read that, I (like everyone else) assumed that corrections to the satellite sea level data since 1993 have now led to a revised trend toward faster (not slower) sea level rise. Right?

Wrong.

During the satellite era (since 1993), the trend in sea level rise was revised downward, by almost 10%, from 3.28 mm/year to about 3.0 mm/year. (For those concerned about Miami going underwater, these numbers equate to a little more than one inch every 10 years). This result was published back in April in Geophysical Research Letters, and the new Nature study looks at the wiggles in the revised data since 1993 and makes ominous pronouncements about sea level rise “acceleration”.

I’m calling “fake science news” on the Nature reporter who covered the story. The headline was technically correct…but misleading. (I can also make up technically correct headlines: “Scientists Agree: Sea Levels are Rising, We are All Going to Die”)

The researchers in April made a major adjustment to the first 1/4 of the satellite record, bringing those early sea levels up. This results in adding curvature to the upward trend (an acceleration) by flattening out the early part of the curve. This new signature of “acceleration” was what made the news in the new Nature study, even though the long term trend went down.

Should this New “Acceleration” be the News?

In a word, no.

Short-term undulations in the sea level rise curve should not be used as a predictive curve for the future. They are affected by a wide variety of natural phenomena. For example, ice loss from Greenland (which was large in 2011-12) has recently reversed itself with huge gains made in the last year. These events are governed by natural variations in weather patterns, which have always occurred.

For longer-term variations, yes, the rate of sea level rise during the entire period since 1993 probably is a little more than, say, during the period since 1900 (sea level rise was occurring naturally, anyway). But the inferred acceleration is small. And even that acceleration could be mostly natural — we simply don’t know.

My main point is that the Nature headline was misleading. They clearly had to find something in the study that supported the alarmist view of sea level rise, and they figured few people would read past the headline.

A face-value reading of the two main studies together results in the conclusion that sea level rise since 1993 has been revised downward. The most recent study then reads too much into the wiggles in the new data, and even implies the acceleration will continue with the statement, “The suggested acceleration… highlights the importance and urgency of mitigating climate change and formulating coastal adaptation plans to mitigate the impacts of ongoing sea level rise”.

The new study does NOT revise recent sea level rise upward, as is suggested by the Nature headline quoted above.

The Former Vice President's Home Energy Use Surges up to 34 Times the National Average Despite Costly Green Renovationsby Drew Johnson

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Introduction

In February 2007, the day after his panicky global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award for best documentary, a shocking report based on public records revealed that Al Gore's Nashville home consumed 20 times more electricity than the average American household.1

Facing scrutiny for his extreme electricity consumption, the former vice president pledged to renovate his home to become greener and more energy-efficient. The extensive and expensive overhaul of Gore's house included installing solar panels and geothermal heating.2

In order to determine the effectiveness of the environmentally-friendly remodel and learn whether the self-appointed spokesman of the environmental movement has amended his energy-devouring ways, the National Center for Public Policy Research obtained Gore's electricity usage information through public records requests and conversations with the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In powering his home, Gore still greatly outpaces most Americans in energy consumption. The findings were shocking:

The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.

The charter for the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment — which includes academics as well as local officials and corporate representatives — expires Sunday. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting administrator, Ben Friedman, informed the committee’s chair that the agency would not renew the panel.

The National Climate Assessment is supposed to be issued every four years but has come out only three times since passage of the 1990 law calling for such analysis. The next one, due for release in 2018, already has become a contentious issue for the Trump administration.

Administration officials are currently reviewing a scientific report that is key to the final document. Known as the Climate Science Special Report, it was produced by scientists from 13 different federal agencies and estimates that human activities were responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.

The committee was established to help translate findings from the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and private-sector officials. Its members have been writing a report to inform federal officials on the data sets and approaches that would best be included, and chair Richard Moss said in an interview Saturday that ending the group’s work was shortsighted.

“It doesn’t seem to be the best course of action,” said Moss, an adjunct professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and he warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies. “We’re going to be running huge risks here and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s economic prospects.”

But NOAA communications director Julie Roberts said in an email Saturday that “this action does not impact the completion of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which remains a key priority.”

While many state and local officials have pressed the federal government for more concrete guidance on how to factor climate change into future infrastructure, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction.

Last week, the president signed an executive order on infrastructure that included language overturning a federal requirement that projects built in coastal floodplains and receiving federal aid take projected sea-level rise into account. Some groups, such as the National Association of Home Builders, hailed the reversal of that standard from the Obama administration on the grounds that stricter flood requirements would raise the cost of development and “could make many projects infeasible.”

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the climate advisory committee represents “an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be “more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”

Richard Wright, the past chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate, has been working with the federal advisory panel to convey the importance of detailed climate projections in next year’s assessment. The society establishes guidelines that form the basis of building codes across the country, and these are based on a historical record that may no longer be an accurate predictor of future weather extremes.

“We need to work on updating our standards with good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,” Wright said Saturday. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for us that the advisory committee is not functional.”

The committee was established in 2015, but its members were not appointed until last summer. They convened their first meeting in the fall. Moss said members of the group intend to keep working on their report, which is due out next spring, even though it now will lack the official imprimatur of the federal government. “It won’t have the same weight as if we were issuing it as a federal advisory committee,” he said.

Other Trump Cabinet officials have either altered the makeup of outside advisory boards or suspended these panels in recent months, though they have not abolished the groups outright. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace dozens of members on one of the agency’s key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards for his department.

Al Gore has provided a target-rich environment of deceptions in his new movie.

After viewing Gore’s most recent movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and after reading the book version of the movie, I was more than a little astounded. The new movie and book are chock-full of bad science, bad policy, and factual errors.

So, I was inspired to do something about it. I’d like to announce my new e-book, entitled An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy, now available on Amazon.com.

After reviewing some of Gore’s history in the environmental movement, I go through the movie, point by point.

One of Gore’s favorite tactics is to show something that happens naturally, then claim (or have you infer) that it is due to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. As I discuss in the book, this is what he did in his first movie (An Inconvenient Truth), too.

That flooding is mostly a combination of (1) natural sea level rise (I show there has been no acceleration of sea level rise beyond what was already happening since the 1800s), and (2) satellite-measured sinking of the reclaimed swamps that have been built upon for over 100 years in Miami Beach.

‘We Faked It!’ – Top Obama Official Stabs Him In The Back With Huge AdmissionBy Gary Maher

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Climate Change. Officials from the former Obama White House are starting to speak out against the corrupt administration now that it is safe to come forward. It’s about time!

The most recent official to come forward is Steven Koonin, the former Undersecretary of the Department of Energy. He is accusing President Obama of fabricating scientific evidence proving “climate change”.

According to Koonin, multiple departments responsible for environmental science either misrepresented data or completely fabricated results to justify the policies of the Obama administration.

Scientists at NASA and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) colluded with press officers to create misleading press releases that supported the former president’s agenda.

Koonin isn’t the only Obama-era official claiming wrongdoing by the Obama administration. Retired principle climate scientist Dr. John Bates testified before a House Committee in February claiming that the NOAA was manipulating data.

Dr. Bates claimed that “the Karl study” was politically motivated and not supported by data. “The Karl study” was a report designed to account for the apparent slowing of global temperature growth.Liberals want to prove that climate change is a real and dangerous phenomenon to justify increased regulation and size of government.

Scientists, motivated by politics, have completely abandoned the scientific method to support their personal opinion. And an entire industry has been created around the false notion that the earth is getting warmer.

In 2007 Al Gore predicted that the polar ice caps would have completely melted away by 2013, but instead, since that time, they have grown larger. Climate scientists were forced to change the name of their theory from Global Warming to Climate Change, because the data did not support that the earth was warming. Now it is becoming clear that climate change is also not supported by evidence.

Climate alarmists like Al Gore may have gotten rich, but their claims are simply not supported by any REAL science.

It is becoming increasingly clear that scientists who support climate change are motivated by politics and not by truth. It’s refreshing to finally hear the truth that WE knew all along.

The Environmental Protection Agency, under President Obama, acted well beyond its authority when it implemented the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration suggests in a new proposal. The document is expected to be revealed in its entirety by next week.

The Clean Power Plan was introduced in 2015 to minimize power plants' carbon dioxide emissions. It came with a list of regulations intended to steer states away from coal and toward natural gas. It is, Politico notes, President Obama's "most important climate regulation." But, the Trump White House argues it comes with too high a price.

The Trump administration is set to rescind former President Barack Obama’s most important climate regulation, arguing that the greenhouse gas standards for power plants violated federal law and could cost consumers as much as $33 billion, according to a draft proposal obtained by POLITICO.

Think the Trump administration were the only ones to disapprove of the plan? Think again. More than half the country sued the Obama administration over the rule. In April, the Supreme Court suspended the lawsuits, suggesting the plan was nearing its end.

In its draft proposal, the EPA explains that the agency's mission is still to “protect and enhance the quality of the nation’s air resources,” but they must act within the bounds of Congress. The Clean Power Plan does not fit the bill.

“The EPA is proposing to repeal the CPP in its entirety. The EPA proposes to take this action because it proposes to determine that the rule exceeds its authority under the statute, that those portions of the rule which arguably do not exceed its authority are not severable and separately implementable, and that it is not appropriate for a rule that exceeds statutory authority — especially a rule of this magnitude and with this level of impact on areas of traditional state regulatory authority — to remain in existence pending a potential, successive rulemaking process.”

Weather.com published an article noting that the two Cat 4 hurricane strikes this year (Harvey and Irma) is a new record. Here’s a nice graphic they used showing both storms at landfall.But the statistics of rare events (like hurricanes) are not very well behaved. Let’s look at this new record, and compared it to the 11+year period of no major hurricane strikes that ended when Harvey struck Texas.

The Probability of Two Cat 4 Strikes in One Year

By my count, we have had 24 Cat 4 or Cat 5 landfalls in the U.S. between 1851 and 2016. This gives a probability (prior to Harvey and Irma) of one Cat4+ strike every 7 years. It also leads to an average return period of two Cat4+ strikes of about 50 years (maybe one of you statiticians out there can correct me if I’m wrong).

So, since the average return period is once every 50 years, we were overdue for two Cat4+ strikes in the same year over the entire 166 period of record. (Again, for rare events, the statistics aren’t very well behaved.)

The Probability of the 11-Year “Drought” in Major Landfalling Hurricane

In 2015, a NASA study was published which calculated how unlikely the (then) 9-year stretch with no major hurricane landfalls was. They came up with a 177 year return period for such an event.

I used that statistic to estimate what eventually happened, which was 11 years with no major hurricane strikes.

I get a return period of 560 years!

Now, which seems more unusual and potentially due to climate change: something that should happen only once every 50 years, or every 560 years?

Our planet probably experienced its hottest temperatures in its earliest days, when it was still colliding with other rocky debris (planetesimals) careening around the solar system. The heat of these collisions would have kept Earth molten, with top-of-the-atmosphere temperatures upward of 3,600° Fahrenheit.

Even after those first scorching millennia, however, the planet has sometimes been much warmer than it is now. One of the warmest times was during the geologic period known as the Neoproterozoic, between 600 and 800 million years ago. Another “warm age” is a period geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred about 56 million years ago.History of hotTemperature records from thermometers and weather stations exist only for a tiny portion of our planet's 4.54-billion-year-long life. By studying indirect clues—the chemical and structural signatures of rocks, fossils, and crystals, ocean sediments, fossilized reefs, tree rings, and ice cores—however, scientists can infer past temperatures.

None of that helps with the very early Earth, however. During the time known as the Hadean (yes, because it was like Hades), Earth’s collisions with other large planetesimals in our young solar system—including a Mars-sized one whose impact with Earth is thought to have created the Moon—would have melted and vaporized most rock at the surface. Because no rocks on Earth have survived from so long ago, scientists have estimated early Earth conditions based on observations of the Moon and on astronomical models. Following the collision that spawned the Moon, the planet was estimated to have been around 2,300 Kelvin (3,680°F).

What the collision that spawned Earth's Moon may have looked like. Collisions between Earth and rocky debris in the early solar system would have kept the surface molten and surface temperatures blistering.

Even after collisions stopped, and the planet had tens of millions of years to cool, surface temperatures were likely more than 400° Fahrenheit. Zircon crystals from Australia, only about 150 million years younger than the Earth itself, hint that our planet may have cooled faster than scientists previously thought. Still, in its infancy, Earth would have experienced temperatures far higher than we humans could possibly survive.

But suppose we exclude the violent and scorching years when Earth first formed. When else has Earth’s surface sweltered?

Thawing the freezerBetween 600 and 800 million years ago—a period of time geologists call the Neoproterozoic—evidence suggests the Earth underwent an ice age so cold that ice sheets not only capped the polar latitudes, but may have extended all the way to sea level near the equator. Reflecting ever more sunlight back into space as they expanded, the ice sheets cooled the climate and reinforced their own growth. Obviously, the Earth didn’t remain stuck in the freezer, so how did the planet thaw?

Even while ice sheets covered more and more of Earth’s surface, tectonic plates continued to drift and collide, so volcanic activity also continued. Volcanoes emit the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. In our current, ice-age-free world, the natural weathering of silicate rock by rainfall consumes carbon dioxide over geologic time scales. During the frigid conditions of the Neoproterozoic, rainfall became rare. With volcanoes churning out carbon dioxide and little or no rainfall to weather rocks and consume the greenhouse gas, temperatures climbed.

What evidence do scientists have that all this actually happened some 700 million years ago? Some of the best evidence is "cap carbonates" lying directly over Neoproterozoic-age glacial deposits. Cap carbonates—layers of calcium-rich rock such as limestone—only form in warm water.

Rock formation in Namibia that shows a type of rock that only forms in warm water (cap dolostone) lying directly over a type of jumbled sedimentary rock, dated to 635 million years ago, that is commonly found at the margin of glaciers (diamictite).

The fact that these thick, calcium-rich rock layers sat directly on top of rock deposits left behind by retreating glaciers indicate that temperatures rose significantly near the end of the Neoproterozoic, perhaps reaching a global average higher than 90° Fahrenheit. (Today's global average is lower than 60°F.)

The tropical ArcticAnother stretch of Earth history that scientists count among the planet’s warmest occurred about 55-56 million years ago. The episode is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

Stretching from about 66-34 million years ago, the Paleocene and Eocene were the first geologic epochs following the end of the Mesozoic Era. (The Mesozoic—the age of dinosaurs—was itself an era punctuated by "hothouse" conditions.) Geologists and paleontologists think that during much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The transition between the two epochs around 56 million years ago was marked by a rapid spike in global temperature.

Around the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, much of the continental United States had a sub-tropical environment.

During the PETM, the global mean temperature appears to have risen by as much as 5-8°C (9-14°F) to an average temperature as high as 73°F. (Again, today’s global average is shy of 60°F.) At roughly the same time, paleoclimate data like fossilized phytoplankton and ocean sediments record a massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at least doubling or possibly even quadrupling the background concentrations.

Deep ocean temperatures were generally high throughout the Paleocene and Eocene, with a particularly warm spike at the boundary between the two geological epocs around 56 million years ago. Temperatures in the distant past are inferred from proxies (oxygen isotope ratios from fossil foraminifera). "Q" stands of Quarternary.

It is still uncertain where all the carbon dioxide came from and what the exact sequence of events was. Scientists have considered the drying up of large inland seas, volcanic activity, thawing permafrost, release of methane from warming ocean sediments, huge wildfires, and even—briefly—a comet.Like nothing we’ve ever seenEarth’s hottest periods—the Hadean, the late Neoproterozoic, the PETM—occurred before humans existed. Those ancient climates would have been like nothing our species has ever seen.

Modern human civilization, with its permanent agriculture and settlements, has developed over just the past 10,000 years or so. The period has generally been one of low temperatures and relative global (if not regional) climate stability. In our next Q&A, then, we’ll tackle this same question on a more Homo sapien-scale time frame: What’s the hottest Earth has been “lately”?

The UN Admits That The Paris Climate Deal Was A Fraud November 3, 2017

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Global Hot Air: Here's a United Nations climate report that environmentalists probably don't want anybody to read. It says that even if every country abides by the grand promises they made last year in Paris to reduce greenhouse gases, the planet would still be "doomed."

When President Obama hitched America to the Paris accords in 2016, he declared that it was "the moment that we finally decided to save our planet." And when Trump pulled out of the deal this year, he was berated by legions of environmentalists for killing it.

But it turns out that the Paris accord was little more than a sham that will do nothing to "save the planet."

According to the latest annual UN report on the "emissions gap," the Paris agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees C by 2100. The goal of the Paris agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees. ((read more)

A while back I did a CFACT piece on the problem that teachers who know nothing about science are actively teaching climate alarmism. The piece was based on an ever-alarmist New York Times article praising this problem as a good thing, when it is just the opposite.

Now the NYT has outdone itself, with what has got to be the nuttiest alarmist opinion piece that I have ever seen. The title sort of says it all — “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.”

There is no climate crisis and capitalism is vastly superior to its alternatives, so there you go; no need to read further. But it is worth looking at how these wild alarmist tales are spun and who spins them, because a lot of people read this junk. And in this case the tale spinner is a teacher, at a prominent American state university school no less: The Arizona State honors college.

The author is Benjamin Fong and his field is best described as psychoanalytic anti-capitalism. I am not making this up. His ASU bio says this: “Benjamin Y. Fong received his PhD in Religion from Columbia University, where he was also an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.”

To get a feel for his psycho-thinking, read this Fong essay and try not to laugh. His claim is that pleasure is a form of subjection that is imposed upon us.

So how does Dr. Fong explain the climate crisis? In the usual way really, with a combination of bad science combined with false confidence in baseless conjectures, artful omissions and left-wing politics. Thankfully he is brief.

He begins with a sciency statement, which is a common opening move in the game of climate alarmism. The statement is that human CO2 emissions today are 10 times greater that they were at the time of one of the great mass extinctions, called the End-Permian. This cataclysmic event occurred a whopping 250 million years ago, for reasons that we do not understand.

How this is relevant is never explained, because the point is to make a vague scary suggestion. He simply slides into the idea that we are now facing a similar fate (for which there is no scientific basis).

Even worse, the statement is absurd. What is not mentioned is that natural CO2 emissions today are something like 20 times greater than our emissions. So if our tiny emissions are a problem then nature’s vast emissions are a far bigger problem, but thankfully neither is true.

The reality is that this vast flow of CO2 is the mainstream of what is called the carbon cycle, which makes life on Earth possible. Atmospheric CO2 is the global food supply. In fact today’s levels of CO2 are very low compared to some past geologic eras, when life did very well. That CO2 levels are rising along with human population is good news, as it helps to feed us. But alarmists like Fong routinely write as though our CO2 emissions were some sort of unique pollution. The very opposite is true.

So this End-Permian stuff is just carefully chosen scary hogwash. Fong then goes on to invoke the conjecture of a precise 7.2 degree warming by 2100. This is just computer model stuff, which is all there is to climate alarmism.

He then switches gears, telling us that the real problem is capitalism, especially the profit motive. There is no science here, just what is called the fallacy of argument by assertion. Anti-capitalists seem not to notice that communist countries try to do the same basic things as capitalist countries, they just don’t do it as well because of the lack of individual freedoms.

For that matter, one would think that someone named Fong would know that Communist China is by far the world’s leader in CO2 emissions, because it is burning vast amounts of coal. But then it is digging its way out of poverty by becoming more capitalist and joining the global economy.

The real reason that the world is not rushing to decarbonize is that it is a stupid idea. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Happily democracy does. The last things we need are dictatorships out to save the world from a fantasy.

When students are taught junk like this by professors they admire you cannot be surprised that they then become alarmist activists. But there is a formula to this stuff which, once mastered, makes refutation relatively easy.

How to do this refutation is what students should be learning. CFACT’s Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow has an important role to play here. They deserve our support.

Teaching climate alarmism in non-science classes is indoctrination, not education.

This is a good article on the "paris climate agreement", aka, how the UN screws prosperous countries!

Climate ExitMar 21, 2018

Quote:

President Trump's pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world's nations signed the deal, and President Obama said "we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet."

That's dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a "massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries."

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump's mind. Al Gore called his stance "reckless and indefensible." Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That's why it's good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn't do much about them.

I'll bet Al Gore and most of the media don't even know what's in the accord. I didn't until I researched it for this week's YouTube video.

Cass tells me it's "somewhere between a farce and a fraud." I interviewed him for a video project I am doing with City Journal, a smart policy magazine that often makes the case for smaller government. "You don't even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment if you don't want to. You send in any piece of paper you want."

The Paris accord was just political theater, he says. "They stapled it together and held it up and said, 'This is amazing!'"

The media announced that China and India made major commitments.

In truth, says Cass, "They either pledged to do exactly what they were already going to do anyway, or pledged even less. China, for instance said, 'we pledge to reach peak emission by about 2030.' Well, the United States government had already done a study to guess when Chinese emissions would peak, and their guess was about 2030."

In other words, China simply promised to do what was going to happen anyway.

"China was actually one of the better pledges," says Cass. "India made no pledge to limit emissions at all. They pledged only to become more efficient. But they proposed to become more efficient less quickly than they were already becoming more efficient. So their pledge was to slow down."

It's hard to see how that would help the planet.

"My favorite was Pakistan, whose pledge was to 'Reach a peak at some point after which to begin reducing emissions,'" says Cass. "You can staple those together, and you can say we now have a global agreement, but what you have is an agreement to do nothing."

However, Cass says one country did make a serious commitment. "The one country that showed up in Paris with a very costly, ambitious target was the United States. President Obama took all the zero commitments from everybody else but threw in a really expensive one for us."

Obama pledged to reduce emissions by 26 percent. If that ever happened, it would squash America's economy.

Nevertheless, when Trump said he was leaving the Paris accord, he was trashed by politicians around the world.

The UK's Theresa May was "dismayed," and Obama said, "This administration joins a handful of nations that reject the future."

Cass counters that if "the future is worthless climate agreements ... we should be proud to reject."

Don't get me wrong: The Earth has been warming, and humans probably contribute to it.

But the solution isn't to waste billions by making emissions cuts in America while other countries do nothing.

Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty. It's good that Pompeo is around to remind him of that.